Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

8.02.2015

My summer with Paul: On "There Will Be Blood" (2007) and prestige pictures

I
remember when the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood dropped in the fall of 2007.It had been approximately five years since
Anderson’s last movie, but it felt like an eternity ago, long enough that I
wondered if something had happened to him, and whether he would still know what
he was doing.I watched the trailer and
my heart sank further.What was this
Oscar-bait prestige-picture costume drama supposed to be?Frankly, it looked boring—the last word that
I thought would ever have to use to describe a PTA movie.

The
film came out at Christmas.The
groundswell of critical support for the film and its bid for the Oscars made me
even more suspicious that Anderson had sold out.Then I read Glenn Kenny’s four-star review of
the film for Premiere.com, in which he called it “an absurdist, blackly comic
horror film.”My interest was
immediately piqued.It became the film
that I couldn’t wait to see.Then I
actually saw the thing.As has so often
been my response to Anderson’s films, my initial impression was one of dizzy
amazement, coupled with a feeling that I needed to see it again before I could
begin to sort out what I thought about it.I went back and saw it a second time in that same week.(This was at the Athena Cinema in Athens,
Ohio, where I was getting my Master’s degree at the time.)When I walked out of the second screening, I
was more firmly convinced that There Will
Be Blood was a masterpiece.And it
was clear that, Oscar nominations or no, this was no prestige picture.

Anderson’s
trick was in making a period film that looks like something by, say, John Ford
but feels like something by, say, Stanley Kubrick. It looked expensive and felt important. Its epic scope, heavyweight performances, and Serious Themes meant that the members of the Academy—as well as more
middlebrow film critics and moviegoers—had
to pay attention to it, and may have convinced them before they sat down that
this was a great film.But its greatness
has less to do with its classicism than with the faint air of hysteria that
slowly takes over the film from about the one-hour mark on and culminates in a
bloody, funny, magisterial final scene that only Anderson could have dreamed
up, or pulled off.Anderson’s penchant
for hysteria, his willingness to push scenes just past the point of good taste
in order to deliver something sublime and outrageous, is antithetical to the
sensibility of the prestige picture, which traffics in restraint, propriety,
and a vaguely invisible style.(Can the
“style” of films like My Week with
Marilyn and The Imitation Game be
described as anything but invisible?)There Will Be Blood wasn’t a departure
for Anderson, nor was it a sell-out.It
was an ingenious bait-and-switch game in which Anderson managed to smuggle a
film as strange and daring and outsized as Magnolia
or Punch-Drunk Love into a
package that looked glossy and safe.